by Patrick Jackson BBC News Online

Richardson's mother Vanessa Redgrave also played Ellida

Trevor Nunn opens the newly refurbished Almeida with Ibsen's The Lady From The Sea which makes waves but falls short of high tide.

Nunn's play opens with the stage sloping down towards the audience and it quickly emerges that we, the spectators, are ourselves the sea above which Ibsen's characters play out their great love story.

Strong currents of longing and regret pass through the little group assembled around the widower Dr Wangel and on out into the audience when the performance works - and it does work magic for most of the time.

But it is the lady of the title who raises the dramatic anchor.

I felt Natasha Richardson's Ellida, the second wife of Wengel, lacked the strength to carry what was otherwise a powerful ship.

The fault, some could argue, may lie in Ibsen's cliffhanger itself which takes the powerful theme of Ellida's lost love - less an old flame, perhaps, than an old wave - and delivers what on the surface appears to be a pat ending to chime with his favourite theme of responsibility.

The play has a great supporting cast

But I felt a stronger interpretation of this most demanding of roles could have covered the distance here between romantic love and the love born in long and careful nurture.

As it was, the mounting hysteria - Richardson's glassy grin and mechanical movements - became wearying and the idea she could suddenly become a mother to her estranged stepdaughters a bad joke.

Other viewers, perhaps, may have valued her for reasons of nostalgia as the overacting recalled uncannily her mother Vanessa Redgrave who has also played Ellida.

Smiles of a summer night

What I took away from Nunn's production was the pleasure of the other acting - brilliant without exception - which more than compensates for the weakness of the central role.

In exchanges worthy of the dramas Chekhov was to write shortly afterwards, the characters cross each other in a heady brew of anticipation and delusion as the brief Norwegian summer closes.

Ellida's stepdaughters re-enact in different ways the love triangle of their parents with the two available males Arnholm (Tim McInnerny) and Lyngstrand (Benedict Cumberbatch).

The boyish Lyngstrand, bearer of a tragic secret of which he alone is unaware, is a touching creation who also brings a rich macabre humour to the play in the malicious hands of Hilde (Louisa Clein).

But McInnerny's Arnholm stole the acting honours for me, creating a figure of twitching, frustrated desire which alone would make the Almeida's new play worth the visit.